What makes Dungeon Dashers fun?Dungeon Dashers is all about getting together with a few of your friends online, exploring dungeons together, going on an adventure, and taking home whatever loot you find in the process. Players take turns to move and attack monsters in the dungeons, and monsters get their turn to fight back. The completed game will feature:

Up to four-players playing together as a team over the internet, or control all of the heroes yourself in singleplayer.

I'm working on an online co-operative multiplayer turn-based game called Dungeon Dashers (WIP name). The idea is that you play with some friends online and take it in turns to move and attack. Once all the players have moved, the monsters do the same and attack you back. Hopefully the most fun aspects of the game will come from the dungeon layouts that I create and the variety of weapons and powers.

Here are some of the tiles that have been commissioned for this project, created by an artist known as Dusty:

Here's a gameplay screenshot, however everything is placeholder besides the tiles. I did not create the player sprite, though I am in contact with the artist to see if he wants to contribute to the game. If he's busy I might need another artist to do the player and monster sprites with animations, so if you're interested, please contact me or post here. Hopefully this screenshot gives you an overall idea of how the game plays:

I'm going to try to post here as often as I can so that I can have a record of the work I've done, and motivate myself to work on the game each day.

Currently I have most of the core engine in. You can host games, connect to them, choose your character, move around, kill monsters, and be hurt by monsters that walk around and fight back.

Next I need to implement some more balanced stats (monsters pretty much die in one hit at the moment) and put in the inventory system.

Thanks! Unfortunately, those character sprites are just placeholders, the original artist gave me permission to display them but he's too busy to do any work on the game.

So far today I have:

contacted pixel artists for interest in character sprites

implemented mouse controls (player voting by clicking on the player)

implemented mouse camera movement (smoothly scroll across the map)

added more indicators for player voting (grey-out who has already had a turn, etc.)

I'm still going to do some more today. Next I'm doing more mouse controls, allowing the player to move by clicking the square that they want to move to. After that I'll take a look at the weapon stats again.

I don't have plans for public tests just yet, but I'll be sure to message you if I need some private testing. It's possible to walk around and attack stuff at the moment, but I haven't balanced weapons or anything yet, so it's not as fun as it could be yet.

Oh, and please make an option for the enemies to move faster because turn based games can become quite time consuming.

This is a really interesting point! I've got a couple of variables in the engine at the moment which allow you to change the delay (and movement speed) of the players/monsters in the game. I was actually quite surprised at the speed of the game in the most recent version. It's a little slower than I had first imagined. This game is actually a spiritual successor to another game I made last year called "Dungeon Dash" (no 'ers').

which is much much faster. So I'm hoping to speed up the play a bit. It can just get quite dense when you have to wait for 3 other players to move.

Some delays are necessary though I think. The smooth camera movement that moves between monsters needs a delay so that it's not jumping all over the place, and there's a pause between two different entities that move.

All in all, with the option to change the delay speeds I think it will allow quite fast gameplay.

Is the new artist that you got going to keep a similar style to the images you've posted so far? or are you changing the style?

Thank you! I literally just found an amazing pixel artist who is going to be doing the character art. So we'll be talking about how we can match his art style with the existing tiles. The tiles will stay the same, and Dusty is still working on the project, but the tiles' palette will most likely have to change in some way, currently they're a little bit 'muted'.

At some point someone is going to have to unify the colours between the tiles and the characters. It would be good for that to happen sooner rather than later!

Above is a screenshot from what I've been looking at most of they day. It's a "Combat Simulation" for the stats in my game which allows me to tweak numbers and see how long it will take for a player to die or for an enemy to die. (DPT = Damage per turn, HTK = Hits To Kill). It looks up stats from other spreadsheets.

There's a lot of numbers and variables, and it's not something I really thought about when I started this game. Having played with this for a fair bit of time today, I think it's time to just jump in and start testing stuff. I did end up changing some mechanics such as how the damage is dealt and what buffs there are:

Strength affects melee weapon damage.

Agility affects ranged weapon damage.

Int/Magic/Wizardry (Not sure on name) now affects magic damage.

Strength doesn't affect damage resistance.

Alex is working on character designs and testing out some perspectives.

On the left the assassin is 3/4 perspective, and on the right is side on.

I have to choose a view for the game and I can't decide which one! The one on the left matches the background view and is kind of 'mysterious', where as the one on the right arguably shows more of the character.

Help me out! Which one should I go with?

I'm really excited to see what Alex comes up with next! And just in case you were wondering, in the later stages of the game all of the colours in the artwork will be gone over to adjust the brightness and contrast to match.

Nice assassin and from also looking at your old mockups with the other characters which are more like the right one and seem to work, I'm going to be the annoying guy and say the right one. Get a clearer picture of the character. Also with lots of characters facing sideways it might look a bit funny and unclear I'm thinking. Like how in your early images you can clearly distinguish all the characters and not sure if it would be as obvious if they were all facing the side. Also would hide the great art Alex is doing and nicer to show it off.

I've just been reminded of something important. The bottom view (side on) is facing right now, but if I want 4 directions then facing up and down might look weird. In contrast, 3/4 perspective can be done correctly with up/down directions. I think I'll settle on that!